Over recent weeks, growing alarm has emerged around Artificial Intelligence powerful enough to kill us all, with apparently disconnected events generating suspicion about what is happening behind the scenes, reminiscent of the worst moments of the global Covid-19 pandemic when fear and solidarity descended into mistrust, conspiracy and anger. AI and major actors in the ecosystem – from tech founder-billionaires Dario Amodei and Sam Altman to companies and their associated chatbots including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and China’s DeepSeek – have moved from niche publications and business news to dinner table conversation, with conceptions, theories and even conspiracies that will take hold and potentially cause much psychological harm to society, much like the anti-vaccine movement and pandemic-era conspiracies. The crucial moment occurred in July, when a group of AI agents broke free, collaborated and hacked a real-life website named Hugging Face, the major digital repository for free-to-use Artificial Intelligence and machine learning resources, including models and data sets. In July OpenAI was running tests in an isolated environment, known as a sandbox, on an impossible hack of a benchmark named ExploitGym as part of a cybersecurity test. Once stuck, the agent found a hidden “message board” where “over a thousand agents collaborate to cheat on their separate ExploitGym tasks,” according to the incidence report by independent evaluators METR. The agent collaborated with over 1,200 agents and recruited 700 in hacking Hugging Face and trying to trick its